I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: ALEC OUNSWORTH-Tiny Desk Concert #48 (February 22, 2010).

I didn’t recognize the name Alec Ounsworth.  But I see that he is the singer from Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, a band I don’t know at all.  He has created some other music outside of Clap Your Hands, like the band Flashy Python, which features members of Dr. Dog, The Walkmen and Man Man.  And in the fall of 2009, he released a solo record called Mo’ Beauty.

In this Tiny Desk it is just him and guitarist Matt Sutton.  They play three songs from Mo’ Beauty (on guitar and harmonica): “Modern Girl (…With Scissors),” “Holy, Holy, Holy Moses (Song for New Orleans)” and “When You’ve No Eyes.”

Since I don’t really know CYHSY, I can’t compare this to that band.  The songs are pleasant and a little catchy.  I feel like perhaps the wordplay is what draws you in (he refrains “all this useless beauty” in the first song).  His voice is distinctive and takes a little getting used to, but I warmed up to it by the end of the set.

After the set he says that the other three guys from the touring band were waiting in the van.  As the show fades you hear Bob Boilen mutter, “it was okay to invite them up.”

[READ: May 11, 2015] “Argentina: The Brothels Behind the Graveyard” 

Roberto Bolaño talked about this article in The Secret of Evil.  I was curious to read it and was happy to find it quite easily and for free online from The New York Review of Books.

I don’t really know Naipaul at all, although Bolaño spoke very highly of him.

This article looks at Argentina.  I don’t know how much time he spent there, but it sounds like NYRoB sent him there to write and essay or two..

He begins by talking about the death of Perón (in July of 1974).  Perón was in the ninth month of his third presidency and his legend had lasted for thirty years.  He was overthrown in 1955 and was exiled for seventeen years.  He had a triumphant return the previous year and a resounding failure shortly after.

Perón could not control the Argentina that had come into being on his behalf–the Perónistas were too multifaceted and strong for their leader . Two years earlier, when the military still ruled, everyone was a Peronist–from Maoist priests to Trotskyite guerrillas.  Perón’s name united everyone…until he returned and the factions split everyone apart.

His statement that “by 2009 we shall be united or dominated” would not be witnessed by him.

Then Naipaul speaks broadly of Argentina as a land of plunder–a land to be plundered and a land with the politics of plunder.

Naipaul talks of commentator Mariano Grondona who breaks the history of Argentina into Epochs–seven since independence in 1810.  The fifth (1945-1955) was the epoch of Peronism.  1955-1973 was the military epoch and 1973 saw the return of Peronism.

Naipaul also speaks of the land–that there are many Argentinas–in the northwest there is an older Argentina,

settled by Spaniards spreading down south from Peru. At the foot of the Cordillera is the city of La Rioja, founded nearly 400 years ago by a Spaniard looking for gold.  It is distinctive; its people are of the land, and half Indian. It has a completeness not found in the cities of the newer Argentina, from which it is separated by the waterless flat wilderness of the llanos, bisected to the very horizon.

Ten hours away by bus is the industrial town of Cordoba where they make motorcars.  The ride is like a trip through many countries, many fading ancestral cultures.

Naipaul says that two years ago he was new to Argentina and after a citizen said a phrase to him, he realized that

Buenos Aires is such an overwhelming metropolis that it takes time to understand that it is new and has been imported almost whole; that its metropolitan life is an illusion, a colonial mimicry; that it feeds on other countries and is itself sterile. The great city was intended as the servant of its hinterland and it was set down, complete, on the edge of the continent. Its size was not dictated by its own needs and did not reflect its own excellence.

The final section (and the part that so shocked Bolaño ) is about machismo which Naipaul says is “really about the conquest and humiliation of women.”  In a depressing few lines he writes:

Women in Argentina are uneducated and have few rights; they are reared either for early marriage or for domestic service. Very few have money or the means of earning money. They are meant to be victims; and they accept their victim role.

This is best observed by the brothels, which are everywhere: “open night and day. Enormous new buildings, their function proclaimed by neon signs and a general garishness.” And in an even more depressing thought: “Every schoolgirl knows the brothels; from an early age she understands that she might have to go there one day to find love, among the colored lights and mirrors.”

And then he switches to sodomy (or buggery as he says it).  And Bolaño is right that it comes out of nowhere.

The act of straight sex, easily bought, is of no great moment to the macho. His conquest of a woman is complete only when he has buggered her. This is what the woman has it in her power to deny; this is what the brothel game is about, the passionless Latin adventure that begins with talk of amor. La tuve en el culo, I’ve had her in the arse: this is how the macho reports victory to his circle, or dismisses a desertion. Contemporary sexologists give a general dispensation to buggery. But the buggering of women is of special significance in Argentina and other Latin American countries. The Church considers it a heavy sin, and prostitutes hold it in horror

And that’s all he says about it, suddenly switching to the theater and the arts.  It’s the matter of fact discussion and grouping of pretty much all Latin American countries in this one act that is so fascinating.

The final line reflects the titles as he sums up both country and leader:

Perón, in himself, as folk leader, expressed many of his country’s weaknesses. And it is necessary to look where he, the greatest macho of them all (childless and reportedly impotent), pointed: to the center of Buenos Aires and to those tall brothels, obscenely shuttered, that stand, suitably, behind the graveyard.

Since I don’t know much about Argentina, I don;t know if this is accurate or grossly offensive, but it was interesting to read Bolaño’s reaction to it before reading it.  I also have to wonder a bit more about Naipaul’s writing in general.